Claudio Pastrone

Bringing the Internet of Things along the manufacturing line: A case study in controlling industrial robot and monitoring energy consumption remotely

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept attracts considerable interest from the academia and industry. This paper provides a set of proof-of-concept prototype descriptions, based on such IoT exploitation, which aim at gathering real-time data along the manufacturing processes that enables a responsive production management and maintenance, including energy consumption and water usage monitoring at each stage of a production cycle. The presented work takes advantage of the ebbits platform, which provides a middleware infrastructure for integrating industrial sensors, devices and emerging wireless technology in the physical world, transforming them into web services that enable seamless integration into mainstream business system such as MES and ERP.

An Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for the IP-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract Integration between wireless sensor networks and traditional IP networks using the IPv6 and 6LoWPAN standards is a very active research and application area. A combination of hybrid network significantly increases the complexity of addressing connectivity and fault tolerance problems in a highly heterogeneous environment, including for example difierent packet sizes in difierent networks. In such challenging conditions, securing the communication between nodes with very diverse computational, memory and energy storage resources is at the same time an essential requirement and a very complex issue. In this paper we present an efficient and secure mutual authentication and key establishment protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) by which difierent classes of nodes, with very difierent capabilities, can authenticate each other and establish a secret key for secure communication. The analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it provides good network connectivity and resilience against some well known attacks.

Frequency Agile Wireless Sensor Networks: Design and Implementation

In this paper we propose an integration of dynamic channel allocation capabilities, typical of cognitive radio networks, in wireless sensor networks based on IPv6 protocol. We analyze the fundamental aspects of the proposed frequency-agile wireless sensor networks, including spectrum sensing, channel selection, network architecture, extensions of the IPv6 stack, and system operation. We then present a complete implementation of a prototype which illustrates feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Results show that dynamic frequency allocation provides significant improvement of performance and reliability in wireless sensor networks operating in highly interfered environments.

An energy and memory-efficient key management scheme for mobile heterogeneous sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is being increasingly adopted in a wide variety of applications ranging from home/building and industrial automation to more safety critical applications including e-health or infrastructure monitoring. Considering mobility in the above application scenarios actually introduces additional technological challenges, especially with respect to security. The resource constrained devices should be robust to diverse security attacks and communicate securely while they are moving in the considered environment. To this aim, proper authentication and key management schemes supporting node mobility should be used. This paper presents an effective mutual authentication and key establishment scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks consisting of numerous mobile sensor nodes and only a few more powerful fixed sensor nodes. Moreover, OMNET++ simulations are used to provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. The obtained results show that the proposed solution assures better network connectivity, consumes less memory, has low communication overhead during the authentication and key establishment phase and has better network resilience against mobile nodes attacks compared with existing approaches for authentication and key establishment.

Industrial application development exploiting IoT vision and model driven programming

In recent years there has been a huge discussion about the IoT (Internet of Things) concept, and even more about IoT within industrial environment. The real IoT is a network of devices with local intelligence (sensors, lights, gas pumps, HVAC systems), which shares access & control mechanisms to push and pull status and command information from the networked world. However, there are still some issues, limiting the IoT diffusion: the devices involved are heterogeneous, with proprietary system of chips, protocols and interface; furthermore, there is a lack of development toolkits, enabling developers to create and evaluate IoT prototypes in simple and flexible manner. The ebbits [1] platform addressed those issues, taking advantages from the IoT vision and providing a middleware infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous industrial devices and sensors, transforming them into web services and thus enabling their seamless integration into existing legacy systems. This paper will introduce the platform and its software architecture, describing features like semantic devices interoperability and entity virtualization. Furthermore, the paper will describe an innovative, IoT oriented, model driven development toolkit. This toolkit leverages on the semantic discovery service, allowing to dynamically selecting and locating available resources or devices, and provides a flexible instrument, including a graphical interface, that enables developers to compose mashup applications.

Heterogeneous Applications, Tools, and Methodologies in the Car Manufacturing Industry Through an IoT Approach

Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, todays production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.

On the performance of ZigBee Pro and ZigBee IP in IEEE 802.15.4 networks

The wide spread of smart embedded devices and the trend towards their inclusion in a unique Internet of Things are making urgent their full integration within the TCP/IP protocol stack. This paper considers ZigBee, a short-range radio communication standard for embedded devices, and compares two alternative protocol stacks, namely ZigBee Pro and ZigBee IP, developed for the integration of ZigBee in the so called Internet of Things. The performance evaluation is founded on experimental results achieved using two test-beds built to this purpose and is based on service reliability and latency as metrics.

Leveraging BIM Interoperability for UWB-Based WSN Planning

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a key part of the Internet of Things vision which aims at bridging together the physical and the digital worlds in several application domains. In the building automation field, WSNs are widely adopted for energy optimization, safety and security purposes, and could greatly benefit from existing information already available in preexisting building information models (BIMs). Such BIMs are normally developed during the building design phase and reused continuously during the construction and operation phases of the building life-cycle. In current deployments, however, due to lack of interoperability such information (e.g., walls geometry, materials, and so on) must often be recollected and reinputed by WSN commissioning specialists. Open development and planning tools and methodologies can play a key role in fostering interoperability and convergence of BIM and WSN systems. This paper aims at demonstrating how increased interoperability between WSN development-support tools and BIM systems could provide advantages to developers, integrators, domain specialist, and BIM users. The methodology is validated by applying a newly proposed tool exploiting BIM interoperability to support the planning of the topology of a WSN based on ultrawideband technologies. The proposed approach is evaluated through a small-scale experimentation held in a historical building in Torino (Italy).

M2M technologies: Enablers for a pervasive Internet of Things

We survey the state-of-the-art on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) from a wireless communications point of view, as a result of the European FP7 project BUTLER which has its focus on pervasiveness, context-awareness and security for IoT. In particular, we describe the efforts to develop so-called (wireless) enabling technologies, aimed at circumventing the many challenges involved in extending the current set of domains (“verticals”) of IoT applications towards a “horizontal” (i.e. integrated) vision of the IoT. We start by illustrating current research effort in machine-to-machine (M2M), which is mainly focused on vertical domains, and we discuss some of them in details, depicting then the necessary horizontal vision for the future intelligent daily routine (“Smart Life”). We then describe the technical features of the most relevant heterogeneous communications technologies on which the IoT relies, under the light of the on-going M2M service layer standardization. Finally we identify and present the key aspects, within three major cross-vertical categories, under which M2M technologies can function as enablers for the horizontal vision of the IoT.

Online Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

In recent years, the adaptation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to application areas requiring mobility increased the security threats against confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of the information as well as against their connectivity. Since key management plays an important role in securing both information and connectivity, a proper authentication and key management scheme is required in mobility enabled applications where the authentication of a node with the network is a critical issue. In this paper, we present an authentication and key management scheme supporting node mobility in a heterogeneous WSN that consists of several mobile sensor nodes and a few fixed sensor nodes. We analyze our proposed solution by using the OMNET++ simulator to show that it requires less memory space and provides better connectivity and network resilience against node capture attacks compared to some existing schemes. We also propose two levels of secure authentication methods for the mobile sensor nodes for secure authentication and key establishment.